Realism, Reflexivity, Conflation, and Individualism

Abstract

Originally published in 2006, this revised edition is updated to respond to critics and to review its thesis in light of the financial crisis. In essence, though, that thesis remains unchanged. As Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert continue to argue, contemporary globalization has enmeshed indi-viduals throughout the world in historically unique circumstances placing an unavoidable burden on each individual to reflexively manage their own life – creating a new and pervasive individualism. Though the authors distinguish their work from other approaches the core point is not fundamentally origi-nal. Elliott and Lemert acknowledge their debt to Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, and Anthony Giddens, in terms of whom the general conceptualization is stated as 'the individualization thesis' rather than the 'new individualism'. 2 In any case, The New Individualism remains the most recent and most intellec-tually enthusiastic statement of an idea which, more than perhaps anything else sociology has produced in the neoliberal age, captures the spirit of that age. As such, it is worthy of sustained critical engagement. The New Individualism, I argue, asks the right questions but gives the wrong answers and this failure is a consequence of the theoretical and methodologi-1